Qubes OS - First Impressions

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Finally! An alphabetical upgrade from PubesOS!

I use Qubes as my daily driver for personal use. It can be a struggle sometimes and I've had to modify my expectations more than once. While I've pondered switching to a standard linux distro, I value what qubes does to much to ever go back. No one does privacy and security as well as Qubes.

Cool that you covered Qubes OS. I personally know one of the devs (we worked for the same company and saw each other everyday). Had only heard of Qubes in passing before meeting them. They wore a Qubes OS shirt occasionally. One of the most competent programmers I've ever met, and the most competent one at that company, actually cared about good code quality and security.

I tried it myself a while ago but it seemed a bit to much considering my threat model. As a gamer, virtualization really kills performance. It makes everything a lot more complicated especially networking. Overall it is a pretty solid OS. I went back to arch for simplicity.

I've been running Qubes OS since about 2017. Pretty much exclusively on 'GhostPads' (corebooted Thinkpads w/ the IME neutralized). Been selling them for as long. I prefer to compartmentalize tasks like gaming and media streaming to a second system to overcome Qubes limitations in those areas. I favor Dell M6700/M6800 mobile workstations running Xubuntu and the GPU either upgraded to a Tesla M6/Quadro M5000M/980m or a Quadro P3000 makes a great high value Linux Steam gaming and media straming box. I use the qubes box for everything except gaming and media streaming. W520/W530 ThinkPads are my preferred platform for Qubes since they are the generally the most powerful systems that can be corebooted and IME neutralized and they max out at 32gb of ram.

the most secure os is actually temple os, can't connect to the internet, even usb connecting is more difficult to the average person, that is why it's the most secure one, this is why qubes os only pitching "a reasonably secure operating system" not "the most secure operating system"

11:27 “unless it’s able to jump the hypervisor, which if it’s able to jump the hypervisor then everything’s screwed” 🤣👍 VMWare has been under attack quite a lot, (ESXi) I’m fairly certain we would have seen demos of qubes being expoilted at black hat conferences etc...if it was vulnerable. Usually with such a secure OS, it’ll be the “user” who makes that mistake which compromises it. Note, you do need a fairly modern and powerful laptop, or pc to run Qube

thanks kenny for the constant quality in your content.

Hey man, just wanna thank you for showing me and everyone else how to be more privacy-aware and how awesome Linux can be! I use Windows since 3.1 and only now I've finally installed a Linux distro on my SSD. Also switched from Chrome to Firefox with many privacy addons. On Android switched a bunch of apps to FOSS and even installed and configured the TrackerControl app. It's been tough but so worth it! I would love if you talked more about Android. What apps you think are good to have there and such. Wish a happy New Year and success!

Instead of switching devices, one of the things that seems interesting to me is with a framework expansion slot SSD. I understand that it's slower and it can cause bottlenecking if you're running an eGPU but It seems really compelling to me.

This is a great OS concept. I've been using encrypted VirtualBox VM's to simulate this kind of environmental segregation for a long time, but to have this built into the base OS is awesome! I'll be trying out Qubes for sure, thank you!

I'm been trying half-heartedly to figure out a way to try this out, but I'm too lazy to dual boot and running Qubes via USB disables several important security features. Thank you for the fantastic explanation of its concepts.

This video gave me cozy 90s computer hacking vibes, thank you it made my night

Now this is actually something I think can be worth trying out. While I don't think that it would be a good use on my main workstation (since I need more speed) I think that it would be perfect for a small traveling laptop that I actually would use on strange and evil networks.

I'm generally glad you are covering this OS. There is not much talk about this operating system out there. Needs be a lot of tutorials and understanding styles of how to actually understand this system.

Everyone on the FBI watchlist switching to Qubes after the Snowden endorsement

Thanks for all the info, tips & review - great stuff. But, can we give some credit to - "Joanna Rutkowska" - the Polish computer security researcher (THE CREATOR/FOUNDER OF QUBES) - without which this video would never have been possible.

Those kinds of solutions never caught up because for the user experience to be sweet and fluid your machine needs to be really a beast, I think that is totally worth it, but not everybody can afford a high end laptop, unfortunately. PS: Shit! It took only 5 replies for the post to fall prey to the Godwin's law!

Different devices for different concerns is definitely the way to go, at least separating work and personal life. I have one phone for work, one phone for myself, one computer for work, one for myself. The biggest "crossover" between these two is when I use my work phone to call my private phone, because I can't find it.